Design is an essential element of any website or mobile app. Whether you are creating the next great social networking app or an e-commerce site for your brick-and-mortar business, a well-designed digital property is what will keep visitors coming back. A poorly-designed website or mobile app, on the other hand, can result in many lost sales.
Beyond the deep connection between design and user experience, design is a critical part of a complete search engine optimization strategy. While the overwhelming discussion about SEO often focuses on keyword strategy and backlinks, I’ve noticed that design is often the integral piece of the SEO puzzle that goes forgotten. Without designing your website or app to be SEO-friendly, you may be getting in the way of your own path toward SEO success by making it harder for prospective customers or subscribers to notice your digital property.
It is worth taking the time to explore how design can truly make your SEO look good. Here are some effective strategies that can help boost your website or mobile app’s SEO.
Design Tips For Improving Your SEO
While implementing a few design tips won’t guarantee that you rise in search engine rankings, the following can certainly tip the odds in your favor. Getting it done may require a large-scale effort with your design and marketing teams and a commitment to keep building on the data you receive.
To start, one of the most important things you can focus on is navigation design. Simply put, you want it to be extremely easy and intuitive to get around your website or app. By doing this, you increase the odds that viewers will stay on your page and navigate through your website, thereby lowering your bounce rate. As you likely know, a lower bounce rate is an important factor when improving your SEO.
So how do you improve your navigation design? Keep your navigation consistent throughout your website or mobile app. Make sure that all of your navigation elements are clickable links. And if you have a search feature, ensure that it actually works. These are small things, but in combination, they can make a meaningful difference in SEO results.
After navigation design, make sure that search engines can effectively crawl your website. To index websites, search engines like Google distribute “crawlers” that automatically discover and scan them. So when crawlers are scanning your digital property, you want to confirm that they can index the entire thing and deliver it to searchers.
To that end, when auditing your site, there are several important things to check. For instance, make sure you’ve submitted your XML sitemaps to search engines like Google and Bing. Ensure that there are no pages that are accidentally being tagged with a meta robots “noindex” command, as this will prevent those pages from being crawled. Confirm that you are linking to other pages on your website so that you can distribute link equity.
Another important design-related SEO tip is to make sure that your URLs are easy to read. Feel free to include your chosen keywords in your URL strings, but try to avoid using unnecessary words or characters. In all likelihood, your content management system will let you customize your URL string for each page, so it shouldn’t be a problem. By prettifying your URLs, you are not only making life easier for your users; you also are making it easier for search engines to crawl your website.
Finally, don’t forget about adding alt tags to your images. Alt tags are essentially quick text descriptions of images on your website or app. Because search engines and their crawlers can’t visually interpret images, they rely on alt tags to provide more context about what the image actually is. While it may be easy to forget about adding alt tags to your images, or ignore them altogether, you will be missing out on a great opportunity to rise in the search engine rankings.
Combining Stellar Design And Strong SEO
Even though design may not be the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about SEO, it can go a long way toward improving your overall search engine ranking. The strategies listed above aren’t that time-intensive or complicated. Ultimately, it just comes down to making SEO a priority for your design team and formulating a comprehensive plan to get the job done.
Take some time to conduct an SEO audit that specifically focuses on the design elements above. Execute these strategies as necessary, and continuously audit your digital properties. All of this work is an investment, but it is an investment that’s worth making.